


oh, we're a mess, poor humans

by boxerzayn



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alot of angst actually im like a machine that feeds off angst i love angst, Angst, Destructive Relationship, Excessive Drinking, Loooooooove, M/M, alot of romaticized sadness/failure i love that too im sorry who am i, liam tries to explain to his dad, they live in florida btw, zayn is a painter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-19
Updated: 2013-11-19
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:46:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxerzayn/pseuds/boxerzayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>zayn and liam’s love is a bit like the way you pick on a zit so much it turns into a wound. it’s like — they love each other so hard it causes the air around them to harden like rock. it causes the bones in their bodies to buck in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	oh, we're a mess, poor humans

**Author's Note:**

> title from a poem by richard siken, love him so much. such an inspiration!! the quote in the beigging is also from him. ehh so im sorry liam is so broken/unproper in this but i like that he's been going a little crazy lately.  
> thankyou,,, and talk to me if you want on tumblr, at champaynepapi dot tumblr dot com!!!

> ❝ he had green eyes, so i wanted to sleep with him. green eyes flecked with yellow, dried leaves on the surface of a pool – you could drown in those eyes, i said. the fact of his pulse, the way he pulled his body in, out of shyness or shame or a desire not to disturb the air around him. everyone could see the way his muscles worked, the way we look like animals, his skin barely keeping him inside. i wanted to take him home and rough him up and get my hands inside him, drive my body into his like a crash test car. i wanted to be wanted and he was very beautiful, kissed with his eyes closed, and only felt good while moving. you could drown in those eyes, i said, so it’s summer, so it’s suicide, so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.❞
> 
> richard siken, _crush_

 

///

it starts out very chaotically. big smiles and big paintings. flesh and blood liam never has tasted before. he probably looks just like a kid tasting chocolate for the first time, senses suddenly shuddering at the new feel you didn’t know was out there.

he laughs too much, at zayn’s sly, quiet words, and finds the bold paintings so very beautiful. it is all bright, loud parties with drugs and fruit and wine and hands, zayn’s slender filthy hands finding their way to places that make liam blush. and oh, how that plump eighteen-year old liam is different from the way he is later. now all fresh like flowers in spring, light green and sweet lilac. later, _afterwards_ , he’s all these deep red colours and tan brown and daring white.

so it starts with the parties and the promises that are just meant for the air between them, for the stone air on the warm roof. but liam feels it in his bones, all this, and in his gut settling.

(and there’s something special about sugary blood slicked onto your fingers like this. there’s something terribly comforting in knowing that if you’re going to break — it’s going to be by someone as beautiful as zayn.)

///

“please know i’ve been thinking about you,” zayn breathes into the phone, “-but i have to go to the states. i do.”

liam sighs, runs a hand through his wellwashed hair, scraping his scalp with his wellcut nails. “i’m going too.”

so then that’s how it continues — zayn running off to america to paint bright oil paintings with charchoal siluettes and liam running off after him. liam doesn’t understand that he’s the one being irresponsible.

///

they live in a small house in florida. there’s alot of green and a lot of blue, grande colours like watched through a film. the air is hot here, that dirty hotness that is alright because he’s so drunk on all of this, liam. all that looks burnt like from an oven and all that is crisp like cracking wood is good. all that is colours and taste taste taste.

and it’s bitter-sweet, doing something reckless like this, being poor and dumb and alive. walking around in a foreign country with your chest torn inside out, having hands for feet and bloody limbs for hands. it’s okay, it’s allright. liam doesn’t want to breathe quite right ever again if he can have this mind-numbing thrill of love.

for liam their skin-cled conversations and brown-yellow-feeling smiles feels so much like not-volverhampton that he sometimes wonders if he’s the same person now.

“you have to stay you, liam, even though you’re in love and finding yourself and all,” his fathers says on the phone sometimes. he just looks out over the morning-sunny pavement street outside the window, hazily blowing out smoke.

he wonders if his father can tell he’s sucking on a cigarette through the telephone.

“what are you doing, anyways?” he’ll ask, and what is liam supposed to say to that? _i’m drinking. painting. writing. i’m absorbing the warmth and the buzz while i can feel it. i’m gonna drain from all my blood some day so i’m replacing it with wine._

maybe something like that, is what he’s supposed to say, but he hangs up.

///

“don’t know if i like you anymore,” zayn says lazily. he drawls with the paintbrush along the huge, white canvas, capturing the arch of liam’s back as if after having touched it so many times his fingers can just hold the brush and the shape will appear simply from the memory his cells hold.

maybe you have to consume what you’re painting that much for it to turn out good, liam thinks, standing completely still in the white room.

drops of sweat are running down the dips of his muscles, and he’s feeling much like a ripe fruit he wants zayn to eat.

“what do you mean you don’t like me anymore?” liam says, several minutes too late.

“i don’t know,” zayn breathes, twirling his long hands with sooty fingers and paint on the insides of his palms. “you’re no longer the innocent boy i loved when i met you, you know.”

,

liam looks at him, at the cracking mouth zayn’s got and the long spidery eyelashes looking almost like they’re about to break. he’s gotten so thin, too.

“i’ve destroyed you,” zayn says, voice ever so light and raw and comfortable.

“’s allright,” liam whispers, because it is. he’s breaking zayn too. they’re both feeding off each other like cannibals.

///

it’s starting to really show, once they head into spring in florida. zayn’s ribs are pointing out as if to say _“i’m here, i’m holding this box of your soft parts together, don’t forget”._ it makes liam cry sometimes at four am in the morning when he’s in that in-between-time when it’s kind of both night and morning at the same time and when he’s not drunk nor sober and when he’s not dreaming nor awake and when he’s sort of quiet and sort of loud and can feel zayns bones poking into his own cinnamon skin.

he knows it isn’t the drinking that’s killing him. it isn’t the lack of food or the smoking.

“it’s ruining you,” liam sludders, into zayn’s hair, stray and drenched in confetti and sweat.

“what?”

“all this _painting,”_ liam says then, because — off course.

“yeah,” zayn whispers, without slur. it surprises liam, he had thought he was going to say _no, it’s not_ , or even _no, you are_ ".

“yeah,” zayn says again, craning his head to face liam. his lips are red and his eyelashes clogged. then — “something had to”

(it’s sounds alot like like _you haven’t_ )

///

one morning the bed is empty.

liam’s used to waking up to zayn smoking through the cracked open window, forcing thick grey air out with cled black by nine days worth of stubble. paint on his fingers and on his neck already from rubbing it there,mcaught up in thoughts.

the bed is body-warm, so zayn must have gone just before liam woke up.

his head is hurting — a dull grey mess about yesterday night. he remembers it in flashes, red anger and blue clear love and white frighten in zayn’s eyes.

liam gets out of bed, his tan stern marble body slowly straddling out into the kitchen. it’s gotten messy, he realises, paint-staines and old half-finished canvases everywhere and dirt and burnt-down candles. there are over-ripe nectarines in a white plastic bag he finds in the mess, and he brings them with him out on the balcony as he calls zayn.

“i had to go to england, see my little sisters,” zayn explains, voice sounding hoarse as if he actually, finally, broke. maybe liam has been to caught up in making it himself doing the breaking that he hasn’t been seeing what’s been going on. “there was like, this voice, in my head-“ zayn continues, and it’s like the churning in liam’s stomach stop and the only sound he can hear is the quiet phoneline-buzz and the dripping of blood behind his ribs.

“you’ve been hearing voices?” liam says weakly, finally.

“i’m okay,” zayn says, “’s allright. i’ll be back soon. i’ll call or text if i wanna talk. i love you so much, liam.”

“i love you too,” liam breathes into the phone, the dusty and sunny morning feeling too still and too quiet. zayn is breathing on the other end of the line.

“but you know i do, don’t you?” he says, sounds desperate in a way that makes liam hungry to taste it all. “i know i’m sort of sick and that i lie but i love you. they’ll hook me to one of those polygraphs in the mental hospital and ask me if i love you and i’ll say no but the needle will jump and sputter exactly how you laugh, liam.”

“you’re not going to some mental hospital,” liam says, and he’s crying now, orange fruit blood from the nectarines dripping off of his chin and saltwater tears running down his cheeks where canals seem to have been made during these past months.

then he hangs up again, because he always has to be the one to hang up.

///

liam doesn’t take care of himself very well these weeks zayn is gone. he tries washing his hair and cutting his nails like he did before he clung onto zayn with every atom he had. he ends up shaving it all off with angsty eyes and bloody teeth. he bites off his nails so they feel like knives rasping on his face when he claws at the thin shape his cheeks have become.

it’s okay, it’s okay, he keeps telling himself, but it’s not.

it hasn’t been since last summer when he let zayn gently handle pills down his throat and push fingers against his neck.

(they’re nothing alike, really — zayn and liam. zayn’s all art and dirt and moon skin and smoke breath, and liam is rock hard bones bones bones, eyes that would taste like dust if you tasted them and not like chili chocolate.

"we’ve only got one thing in common, really-” zayn had said this one time, burnt smell in the air and vodka in liam's veins like blue lightning. “-it’s this tongue of yours.”)

he keeps getting these strange drunken texts from zayn —

**i am a blade of grass w an anxiety disorder, you are an insect that natural secretes xanax, you climb on me, i am a happy blade of grass**

**i am a leaf, panicking as it falls from a tree, slowly, without control, toward you thikning ‘oh god oh god oh god**

**we are trees and our branches touch in the wind. we wish we could move closer**

— but he never replies. _okay. i am still here. i am drinking. painting. writing._ is that what he’s supposed to say?

///

the fourth week of living in their florida home alone, liam brings someone back. he’s been drinking a lot out in bars but all the people have looked at his messy buzz cut and not bothered to listen to his sad slurs.

(danielle isn’t ‘all the people’.)

so they meet at the warm, hazy bar and they walk on the deep blue streets and talk. about zayn mostly, art, food.

danielle has jumped off dance school and been been to every county in europe and tasted all sorts of foods, mamosa, greek cheese, spanish mangos straight from the branch. “’s great-,” the tanned, firm-smooth girl says. “i think you should spend more time on food and paintings and things like that.”

“yeah,” liam says, but he can’t agree, not really. he wants to tell danielle about the fact that when you’re so in love with someone as he is with zayn, once someone is so completely the one making your chains and bolts and cogwheels churn — then you can simply not enjoy anything fully without having your other half there, too.

it’s sience, quite frankly. but how can danielle know?

all they do in liam’s and zayn’s apartment is drink and talk and kiss, and liam can hardly be the one making things between him and zayn worse. into the phone later, tears on his face and danielles slender hands wrapped around his neck soothingly, he spits “you’re in my veins, you fuck."

the next day zayn comes home.

///

"what is it you write?" louis says on the other end of the line, sharp and kind like he always is nowadays. cautious, but on point.

“letters, mostly, to my dad,” liam explains, “but i never send them. ‘s so hard to explain on the phone. “

 

yeah,” louis says. “send ‘em to me then. to me an’ ‘arry.”

liam smiles, waves at zayn who’s entering the door.

“okay,” liam says, throat suddenly feeling dry. it must be the smoke, raspig his voice.

“goodbye, louis. say hi to harry from me.”

///

 

>  
> 
> dear dad.
> 
>  
> 
> you must understand that i had to go to america with zayn.
> 
>  
> 
> had to be a little reckless. i love him so much and i know so little. i know so many facts about humans and the world and all these things but i haven’t touched anything with my fingers, dad. i haven’t tasted anything. i had to go. i hope you’ll understand.
> 
>  
> 
> see, the human body has nerves that together meet up to 480000 kilometers.
> 
>  
> 
> what colour are human neves? when i think about zayn mine feel light blue or maybe white, all electric and tense.
> 
>  
> 
> 480000 kilometers of nerves can be wrapped 120 times around our earth. it makes me sad how many homes could be lit up by the electricity in my body. it just goes around and around and around in my stomach. makes me dizzy.
> 
>  
> 
> dad, the human body has about 30 trillion white blood cells, all fighting enemies that could possibly hurt me. everytime i get sick my they attack so that it can never happen again, you know how it works.
> 
>  
> 
> so infections and diseases might be important to kill off but what about the trickeling want sprouting from the tips of my fingers? i can feel this boring life of rainy england poisoning my lungs and tying knots of all of the nerves in my stomach.
> 
>  
> 
> i love him, dad. i have these dull brown eyes and i know it’s in our dna what colour they have but zayn has eyes dad, that would taste like chili chocolate if you could eat them. i want that. i suppose this is more a love letter to him than a letter to you.
> 
>  
> 
> i’m sorry. you must understand.
> 
>  
> 
> liam
> 
>  


End file.
